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iOS

Pascal Hausberger
Pascal Hausberger
16,453 Points
Posted by Pascal Hausberger
Pascal Hausberger
16,453 Points

Dealloc confusion

Hey Stone Preston Matthew Mascioni Kevin Lozandier ,

When does one have to use the dealloc method?

I have never used the dealloc method so far, but even testing on an actual device never caused any problems.

If I don't deallocate, does that increase the memory size of the app on the iPhone? Or is there any other advantage/function for this method?

Thanks a lot!

Cheers, Pascal

4 Answers

Stone Preston
Stone Preston
42,016 Points
Stone Preston
Stone Preston
42,016 Points

if you are using ARC (which you should be) you dont have to worry about using dealloc. ARC takes care of that for you. However there are some cases (like unsubscribing from notifications using NSNotificationCenter) where you would want to implement the dealloc method yourself and perform some custom cleanup tasks. However thats pretty situational and ive only done that in the case of notifications

Matthew Mascioni
Matthew Mascioni
20,444 Points
Matthew Mascioni
Matthew Mascioni
20,444 Points

Seconding Stone Preston's answer :) The main thing I've used it for is in NSNotifications. All new projects use ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) by default now.

Kevin Lozandier
PLUS
Kevin Lozandier
Courses Plus Student 53,747 Points
Kevin Lozandier
Kevin Lozandier
Courses Plus Student 53,747 Points

Preston is correct, but there are times you still need to clean up for yourself that isn't necessary directly associated with dealloc, but still incredibly important throughout the app lifecycle.

For example, in extreme cases, - (void)didReceiveMemoryWarning can be your best friend as far as managing memory in your application towards an app that is stable and has a relatively low memory footprint than most apps.